A Healing Response to Self-Refection - Guided Meditation

Foreign guided meditation is for so many people, the best way to truly gain benefit in your response to personal challenges. As you invest in bringing your own experience to the guided meditations, you'll give yourself the best chance to change long standing patterns from suffering toward a state of well being, peace and healing. It's important to put yourself in a comfortable body position in a private space where you're not disturbed. Turn off your phone and be ready to really be alert. So just let yourself settle in a easy position where, where your body is relaxed and take note. Where it's harder to relax and see if you can support yourself by just moving a little bit and giving yourself permission to continue to move for your own body's comfort. Notice your body sensations. Does your knee hurt? Is your stomach growling? Are you at peace? Are you relaxed? And just maybe even start by saying body. I want you to relax as much as possible and ask yourself the question, what is your most challenging emotion either during this time period or perhaps it's right now, and one that I really dislike. See if you can identify your challenging emotion. See if you can identify it really crisply, clear and simple. And do the same for your attitude toward the emotion. So if you're feeling annoyed, see if you can notice, does that make you happy? Or do you feel disgusted? Or do you feel annoyed that you're annoyed? Just see what your your emotion is that is rejecting you or that is not nice to you at least. And don't add just judgments if possible. Just try to stay aware. This is my challenging feeling and this is the way that my thoughts judge me. And let yourself meet that with I see you. I am the observer because that observer gives me the best chance of seeing myself rather than acting out against myself or against anybody else. And that observer can guide you to ask the question, do I want to care for myself while I'm feeling this challenging emotion or would I rather punish myself? Hopefully that lets you crack a little bit of a smile where you realize, of course I want to support myself, but in real life it happens so fast. It's not of course. And that's why the observation is so important, so that you can see distinct steps of challenging feelings. Finding a place that wants to care. And then it leads you to a crucial question of how can I best care for myself when I'm feeling my particular challenging emotion all the way through this time? Stay aware of your challenging emotion and let yourself feel it. Stay aware of your desire to care. And stay aware of if there's any reaction that is critical of you, rejecting of you, including something that would be more like self abandoning, where you're withdrawing from yourself so you don't even see the challenging emotion anymore. And instead let this observer guide you to these crucial steps of awareness of the challenging emotion, finding the desire to care, activating it, and noticing if there's the obstruction of self rejection, and if so, meeting it with your awareness that says, I can tolerate you, but you're not my number one focus. I'm going back to my challenging emotion because I want to take care of myself, because I want to be able to live a life where my essential needs are activated. I want my awareness to work for me. I want my observer to work for me because when I really live in my essential needs, it takes care of everybody else too. And so return to that question, though, that says, what emotion do I feel the most aversion toward? Because that can so subtly lead you down a rabbit hole. And if you can see it, you can say to it, I see you. I'm not going to let you take me away from what is my bigger challenge. Now, that challenging feeling could be anxiety, depression, emptiness, exhaustion, impatience, annoyance, irritation that is so important to honor by allowing yourself to hold it in your awareness and not add any more judgments. See if you can appreciate that you have this observer that can see this dreaded state of this challenging feeling. And I say that with a smile, that dreaded state, as if it's so dramatic, when sometimes of course, it is very serious. But being able to be aware of it is your hope. It's the beginning of the direction of caring for yourself. You then pivot toward, do I want to care for myself? How do I care for myself? And you find a place inside your heart that says, of course I want to care for myself while I'm feeling this difficult feeling. You can have the most major influence by identifying more and more with your observer, with your awareness that can see everything as it looks inside. In a sense, that awareness of whatever your difficult emotion is, your desire to care, your self rejecting emotions, that observer is very likely the best definition of who you are. And the more you identify with being the observer, the more resourceful you can be to be a healing influence while you're in your challenging emotion. And without this awareness, you will go amok, it will get worse, or it will at least be stably injuring you. But with that awareness, it gives you that reminder, oh, I can care for myself. So at the start of really entering into this awareness of these variety of states, you may be able to care for yourself 1%, and after you do it 10 times, you might be able to care for yourself 5%. You're just trying to increase the amount that you're able to care for yourself and then identify specifically what your needs are that you want to foster in both your thoughts in the immediate and the actions that may be immediate or maybe in the future, or it may be developing qualities that are going to help you deal with emotions like impatience and intolerance. When you see your challenge emotion or you see the self rejection, it's so important that this observer says something like, it's okay that you are a part of my inner life and it's okay that you may be rejecting me, but I see you now. I have no more need for you because you aren't serving me. Rejecting me for the way I am isn't going to help. And so I'm going to foster this intention to care for myself and discover some specifically the needs that will help me. I want to move toward an accepting awareness and ask, how can I best support you when you're in this state? So you're asking yourself that question right now. And look what thoughts arise, what might allow you to be more at peace or more in strength and recognize this is just the beginning. You're going to be having much more guidance as time goes on as to how you can make this move from the challenging feeling toward the essential needs. But you need to be very, very versatile. What your challenging feeling is in your awareness of it and in your awareness of the essential needs that will help guide you. In addition to this inquiry questioning, there's a second option as to how you can respond to yourself when you're in your challenging feeling. And there might be self rejection there. And that's what might be called an informal kind of prayer. It's a heart quality, and you're asking for that quality which is very close to the exact opposite of what you're feeling. So if you're feeling impatient, you might be really asking, can I find patience? If you're irritable, can I find or focus more in my tone of voice or just my inner tone on being more patient or more tolerant. There's also a third practice, and that would be asking yourself what specific thoughts would be most helpful. When I'm feeling this challenging emotion, ask yourself that question now. It may be something like, I'm here to support you and I'm a partnership with you and we're going to brainstorm in this together. You're going to be challenged emotionally and I'm going to be the one that's resourceful. I'm going to be the observer that's going to keep asking you what are those thoughts that are going to help you if you're in fear, tolerance is probably first. Now only you would know what might be those thoughts. But as you're inquiring, how do I support myself with both my challenging feeling and my self rejection? You have the possibility of asking yourself a question. You have the possibility of sending a quality that's close to the exact opposite of the quality that your challenging feeling is in. Or you can find the thoughts that would most guide you and and your observer can help you with all of those. You may and likely will need to do this meditation many, many times because it's not something that you've learned that was taught in high school or junior high school or by your parents. So don't expect yourself to get it right away. Just stay appreciative if you can find that appreciation that you're endeavoring to go to a place that is not utterly familiar to you and that you have the courage and the humility to go for it. Following this guidance will help you move toward an empathetic, compassionate awareness. It gives you a chance to pivot. It gives you a move it could almost make you look forward to once you get it. Not feeling well. Because you can practice how to be resourceful and see as we end this meditation. If you can appreciate your sincere effort to stay with yourself and to be aware of how to care, how to be honest and humbly noticing what's happening and recognizing that all of this effort will create you and those that you love enormous benefit.